Content Audits Part 4: Web Content Audits

Content Audits Part 4: Web Content Audits

I recently wrote a blog post on Content Strategy: Content Audits, where I explained how important having a content strategy is to producing high-quality, reusable and consistent English and translated content. I also wrote a blog post on Content Audits Part 3: Marketing Collateral Audits. Your website is a very important part of a marketing content strategy, and so instead of including it with the marketing collateral audit blog post, I’m devoting an entire blog post to website content audits.

A content audit is the first step in the process of putting a website content strategy together. A website content audit consists of an inventory, which is a representation of all the content and the parts that make up a website, and a qualitative analysis, which is an evaluation of that information for a variety of measures depending on your business goals.

There are many business goals that may require a content audit of your website such as SEO strategy, site migration, site redesign, content marketing strategy or globalization. Although the types of data that you capture might vary depending on your business goals, the process is the same. Since it’s relatively easy and quick to make changes to web content, it’s important to have a plan for auditing your website on a routine basis.

Some information on the web such as specifications, product descriptions and contact information is also usually found in technical documents, training materials and marketing collateral, so if possible, you may want to consider expanding the scope of the project to include these materials as well.

Content Inventory

First you need to take a content inventory of your website. Depending on your business goals, you may want to capture categories of information like URLs, images, documents, links, videos, file size, word count, metadata (title, keywords, descriptions), analytics, page owners, dates and more.

There are many tools available, some for free and others for a fee. These tools automate the process, providing reports and dashboards. Using one of these tools can be a good option if you have a large website and a budget.

You can also capture the information on a spreadsheet by copying the data for the items that you’re interested in analyzing. This approach can be more time-consuming but it’s cheaper.

Qualitative Audit

Once you have the content inventory, it’s time to evaluate the data. What you evaluate will depend on your business goals.

Here are some suggestions for categories to evaluate based on different business goals:

You can capture the findings in a spreadsheet, in an automated tool (if it has that feature) or another document type.

Next Steps

Analyze the results of the audit. With your business goals in mind, look at the current and future state. Make actionable, measurable recommendations based on the data along with pros and cons of each one and then present your findings to your key stakeholders.

Given how frequently website content changes, don’t forget about planning for ongoing content audits. These can be done on a regular schedule, after a big content update, after new pages are added or other intervals. Don’t forget to include a recommendation for ongoing audits in your findings to your stakeholders.

Conducting frequent audits will keep your website in good shape.

Conclusion

Your website is a critical marketing tool and your customers should have a good experience with it. Conducting an inventory, auditing different categories and then analyzing the findings is key to an overall marketing and website content strategy.

Resources for Content Localization and Content Strategy

You may gain further insight into content strategy, content localization, translations and related topics by reviewing previous blogs written by GPI:

Further GPI Resources on Global SEO

Globalization Partners International (GPI) frequently assists customers with multilingual website design, development and deployment, and has developed a suite of globalization tools to help you achieve your multilingual website localization project goals. You can explore them under the Translation tools and Portals section of our website. You may also find some of the following articles and links useful:

For more information or help with your next website translation project, please do not hesitate to contact us via e-mail at info@globalizationpartners.com, or by phone at (866) 272-5874, or by requesting a free web translation quote on your next website translation project.

Daniela Bustamante

Director: Global Production Services

Daniela has over 20 years' experience in the translation, localization and language instruction professions. She holds a degree in Sworn, Literary, Technical, and Scientific Translation from the Instituto Nacional de Enseñanza Superior Olga Cossettini in Rosario, Argentina. Starting her career as a translator for English-Spanish/Spanish-English in 1990, over the years she has worked for several Translation Agencies as a translator, assistant project manager, senior project manager and global production manager.
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She has completed a wide range of professional certifications in document and website localization with emphasis on translation, budgeting, quality control and project management, including The Localization Institute’s Triple Certification in Localization Project Management (Localization Institute Chico, CA, USA).
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She has managed a wide variety of document, website, software and audio-video localization projects for clients around the world utilizing an array of Translation Management Systems (TMS), Translation Memory Tools (TM) and authoring, publishing and translation tools.
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In her free time she enjoys reading and international travel.